This track explores the mindset, stances, and skills needed for effective facilitation, coaching, mentoring, and teaching in an agile team context. You will develop an appreciation for the art of facilitation as a key to fostering collaboration and enabling self-organizing teams. You will also acquire the ability to understand teams as human systems, acquiring the skills necessary to create safe environments for meaningful collaboration while supporting healthy conflict resolution within the agile team. As a professional agile coach you gain the toolset to foster collaboration, and the skills to serve individuals on any team. More importantly, you will gain the self-awareness and self-management required to navigate among these stances in service of teams, and to serve as a role model of agile values and principles.
Target Audience
Primary Audience: Agile Coaches and aspiring Agile Coaches, including Scrum Masters looking to take the next step; team members with the desire to explore the power of facilitation and coaching; agile team leaders or aspiring team leaders with a passion for servant leadership and a desire to learn and practice the art of facilitation in the context of team facilitation and coaching; anyone with a desire to learn and practice facilitation, professional coaching, mentoring, and teaching in service of Agile teams.
Relevant roles: ScrumMasters, Agile Project Managers, Agile Coaches and aspiring coaches, Iteration Managers, Product Owners, Business Analysts, and anyone with the desire to explore the power of facilitated coaching.
Coaching
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Show Summaries
A guide for bringing out the best in others and coaching teams, by the famous coach of Steve Jobs, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt.
Taking the leadership playbook of Bill Campbell, the famous coach of Apple and Steve Jobs, and Google's Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt - and making it open source. This "Trillion Dollar Coach Book" is a golden guide for bringing out the best in others and coaching teams.
Exploring the role of a coach in an agile team, the options available, the challenges normally faced, and techniques employed.
Geoff Watts leads this interesting presentation discussing the roles of a coach in Agile. He explores some of the options that would be available to you as a coach, the challenges you might encounter, and the techniques you would employ to solve these challenges.
Don’t mistake output for outcomes - agile coaches help you learn to see with Agile eyes and act with an Agile mind.
Todd Lankford explores the challenges encountered when measuring the value of an Agile coach. Based on his long experience as an Agile coach, he notes that it's not easy to measure the value of Agile coaching. He suggests that the best way Agile teams can leverage is by striving to achieve five outcomes, like helping the organization see waste, applying actions to Agile problems rather than planning, and bolstering the organization while implementing Agile, among others.
Supporting people through positive coaching experiences.
Having seen that there is an enormous gap that separates available education and the reality of the Scrum Master / Agile Coach profession, the author shares his view on a better way to work with people. Roland Flemm proposes that by understanding yourself, the basics of human psychology and the principles of Solution Oriented Coaching, a servant leader can become more effective.
The role of emotional intelligence in agile leadership and transformation.
Agile experts Kara Kowert and Brad Appleton present well-detailed slides about ''What is the Emotional Intelligence/ Quotient (EQ), and its role in Agile leadership and Agile transformation." The Agile Aces note that EQ is the ability to recognise, understand and manage
emotions in ourselves and others and includes four main domains. Learn more about these EQ four areas and the roles that EQ plays across the Agile framework.
Reframing techniques to deal with the negative impact of bad situations.
Anyone can initiate change in a company, but beware of certain personality types, such as psychopaths and narcissists. These are personality disorders that show a great lack of empathy, impulsiveness and lack of responsibility. All these toxic behaviours generate constant conflict in the organisation. It is important to analyse their impact and focus on the four key areas described in this article.
Learn how to use the “Agile Coaching Growth Wheel” as a tool to refelct and become a great Agile Coach and develop your agile coaching techniques.
Presented as a tool for Agile Coaches and ScrumMasters to help them reflect and grow themselves on their Agile journey, the growth wheel lays down some core competencies with identified levels of expertise. Budding Agile Coaches are encouraged to 1) identify an area of improvement; 2) reflect on a competency area; and 3) brainstorm options and generate actions. It is a tool to understand your drives, beliefs, values and strengths when you manage your emotions when interacting with others.
What a Scrum Master may ask a PO in order to help coach them in their role.
Fredrik Wendt shares 10 questions a Scrum Master may ask a Product Owner to help coach them in their role. Since not all questions apply to every context, and individuals have different definitions of success, methods of work, or team compositions, he advises you to take these questions as a starting point to craft the perfect set for your needs.
Effective organizational coaching must take a balanced approach with more time spent coaching "up" than "down".
Robert Galen tells the tale of how a coaching firm was contracted multi-billion-dollar organization for a 15 million dollar project. The consulting firm then hired 10 disparate coaches with no engagement strategy nor consistency of coaching approaches. In the two year engagement, 150 scrum teams were ramped up - a great numbers success. The experience showed the difference between coaching "down" (changing the teams) and coaching up "changing upper management), and the effects of sustainable change.
Useful pointers to develop a clear and concise language, make comments, and share observations during coaching sessions.
Have you been searching for the most effective way to coach clients about your organization's products or services? Kalina Terzieva positions Direct communication as the best method, and we learn its appropriate definition and how it's applied in coaching. She unpacks helpful tips that coaches can adopt for successful coaching sessions.
Visualize the degree of scrum adoption in the corporate environment.
How much should we adapt scrum to our specific situation? Zack Bonaker suggests that before customizing the "off-the-shelf" methodology, teams should first achieve the maximum potential improvement offered. With each tweak of the framework, organizational dysfunctions exacerbate the potential problems - so he offers a tool to measure the degree of adoption of the corporate environment.
The impact of being an active listener and asking powerful questions in a coaching session.
Interested to Learn the best tactic coaches should leverage to help people transform? The article explains why a coach should ask direct questions and how these questions are the transformational factor during a coaching session.
Mental Models
True enterprise agility requires a new mindset - a shift from a results-focus to an improvement-focus, where failure is accepted as part of the learning cycle. This new mindset pushes participants out of their comfort zones by empowering them to resolve day-to-day issues using their collective creativity, while giving them the support and safety necessary to try new ways of working. This mindset has its roots in scientific principles, where improvements are tried out and the results analyzed for imperfections - allowing an impartial judgement of outcomes.
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Dispense with much of the drama and dysfunction we typically see on software projects.
Traditional project management methods do well with the known. In software we deal with the unknown. These facts, inconvenient as they may be, are what create much of the drama and dysfunction we see in our industry. Once you accept these three simple truths, leading agile projects becomes a lot easier. You don’t stress as much about schedules (we know we’re already late!). You stop trying to own problems that are outside your sphere of control. And you just accept that there is always going to be more to do than time and money allow. But accepting these simple truths frees you from all that. It allows you to see that which is clearly, and to not try and change something that can’t be changed.
A look at where transformation really starts - if it begins with individual mindset change or with the organizational culture.
Most transformation projects begin by asking individuals to change their mindset. The focus is often on the individual stubborness and resistance to adopting new ways of working. Bojan Smuja attempts to view this issue from the individual point of view, and shows how easily a person changes their ways when their surroundings (i.e. the organizational culture) guide them to. With this, a point is made that good change implementation strategies are key to ensuring changes do not fail.
Shedding old behaviours is not comfortable, specially when it contradicts with your current understanding.
The smartest person in the room is not smarter than the whole room is just one of the lessons I'm thankful I learned.
Agile legend Mike Cohn shares lessons he has learned during his professional career and tells a brief story of each one to help the reader avoid these mistakes. These lessons are specially useful when you are facing difficult decisions, as they are focused on the values you should develop instead of prescribing solutions. In reading them you will get a clear message: hard work pays off in the long term.
Learning Styles and Modalities
Individuals differ in how they learn, and their ability to internalize information is likely related to the modality used for the acquisition. Learning modalities are the sensory channels or pathways through which individuals give, receive, and store information. Perception, memory, and sensation comprise the concept of modality. The modalities or senses include visual, auditory, tactile/kinesthetic, smell, and taste. From these modalities there are possibly seven learning styles: visual (spatial), aural (auditory), verbal (linguistic), physical (kinesthetic), logical (mathematical), social (interpersonal), and solitary (intrapersonal).
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How play can convert seemingly relentless resistance to change into joyful anticipation of growth instead.
Play is the most effective and efficient way of enabling children - and adults - to learn, lead, collaborate and be at their best.
In this highly interactive talk, you will experience the catalyzing power of play and gain an understanding of how play can convert seemingly relentless resistance to change into joyful anticipation of growth instead. Develop a greater appreciation of how to create transformational change for you and others, and understand how to apply this to your organization.
Mentoring
Mentoring is a process for the informal transmission of knowledge, social capital, and the psychosocial support perceived by the recipient as relevant to work, career, or professional development; mentoring entails informal communication, usually face-to-face and during a sustained period of time, between a person who is perceived to have greater relevant knowledge, wisdom, or experience (the mentor) and a person who is perceived to have less (the protégé).
Management Consulting
Consultancies may provide organizational change-management assistance, development of coaching skills, process analysis, technology implementation, strategy development, or operational improvement services. Management consultants often bring their own proprietary methodologies or frameworks to guide the identification of problems, and to serve as the basis for recommendations with a view to more effective or efficient ways of performing work tasks. Organizations may draw upon the services of management consultants for a number of reasons, including gaining external (and presumably objective) advice and access to consultants' specialized expertise. Due to their exposure to, and relationships with numerous organizations, consulting firms are typically aware of industry "best practices".